Wall Street Tech Jobs Can Pay $200K to $400K, But They’re Not Easy to Get

Who's a tougher interview: Wall Street or Google?

A still from a recruiting video for Goldman Sachs’s technology division.

Wall Street gets a lot of flak in the tech world for being boring, corporate and not world-changing enough. But the truth is that for many, cushy salaries are enough to overcome the drudgery and debasement that comes with a job as Goldman Sachs code monkey.

But getting a job on Wall Street isn’t easy, and a first-person account by David Mandi in The Register goes so far as to compare the interview process to “gang sadism.” The famously painful, grueling process involves hours of interviewing with prospective team members, which amounts to an intimidating interrogation-by-panel. “What this means is hours of interviews by a large number of people, many of them with big egos and very high self-opinions – people who sometimes see their goal as digging for proof that you don’t have what it takes to be one of their elite team,” Mr. Mandi writes.

Even worse than the time sink, he says, is when interviewers fixate on “technical arcana,” or minutiae that most programmers would look up in a reference rather than commit to memory.

“The team is not diverse. The person interviewed me didn’t show much respect to people. He even laughed at me not remembering some technical detail,” one interviewee who applied to be an applications developer at Citigroup wrote on the anonymous jobs dishing site GlassDoor.